The words "quick and easy" don't
typically come to mind when one thinks about data center deployment. But as
more companies and organizations are building out data centers and
consolidating servers, the need for simplification has probably never been
greater.

Looking for a simpler way and something that is now on the GSA schedule, solution
provider TVAR Solutions, based in McLean, Va., recently joined up as a partner with FastScale and
is taking advantage of the company's just released FastScale Composer Suite 3.0
Enterprise Edition.

While the new release is aimed both at commercial and other customers, TVAR
found that the release opened doors with government customers.

"The new features help government customers who have strict certification
requirements," says Toby Zellers, vice president of strategy and solutions
at TVAR. "They may require certain bits of code be in the software stack.
Now, the way stack optimization works, they can make sure those pieces of the
stack are there."

FastScale Composer is a GUI-driven software platform for building, managing and
deploying software stacks. The most recent version allows for deployment of
custom stacks and not just a lightweight build enabled by previous versions,
says Jerry McLeod, vice president of marketing and business development at
FastScale. The software enables logical servers to be added and configured in
the software stack and then deployed multiple times across environments
including physical servers, virtual servers and in the cloud, he says.

"As a government reseller, having the custom configuration was very
important," says Zellers. "It was a conversation piece with the
previous version, and this question always came up." Zellers adds that
FastScale was added to the GSA schedule in July.

FastScale is a relatively new and small company, currently working with just
eight channel partners. McLeod notes that it is not just government customers
that are interested in this kind of technology. With FastScale, he says, once a
stack is set up it can be deployed over and over, and it can be edited and
changed.

"Customers don't want to be told a deployment is going to take 20 days," McLeod says. "They want to be told it's 20 minutes."

Jessica Davis covers the channel for eWeek and Channel Insider. Her technology journalism career began well before anyone heard of the World Wide Web and has included stints at Infoworld, Electronic News/EDN, and the Philadelphia Business Journal. Her work has also appeared on CNN and Forbes.com. She has covered hardware, software and networking, as well as the business side of technology. She has won several journalism awards, including a national ASBPE award for best staff-written column, and was named Marketing Computers hardest working tech journalist on their inaugural list of top tech journalists. Jessica can be reached at jessica.davis@ziffdavisenterprise.com